Adventures in Home Brewing

After visiting so many awesome local breweries, I wanted to try brewing myself, so a few weeks ago I hung out with my friends Steve and Eli and we made ourselves some Irish Stout (aka, knockoff Guinness). It was not the glamorous, high-tech process I originally imagined, but it sure was fun. Here's a general breakdown of how the magic happened.

Sanitizing- One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from visiting breweries is that the work is about 90% sanitizing and only 10% actual brewing. So the first step was to sterilize our equipment.

Pouring and Stirring- Next we heated up the water and added the stout mix and the malts. After that cooled we added the yeast and sealed it up.

Waiting- The beer sits in the bucket for about 5 days while the yeast does its thing.

Bottling- We used tubing to siphon the beer into bottles from the bottom up. You can either buy new bottles or just clean and reuse your old pry-off bottles. This batch filled 43 12oz bottles.

More Waiting- The beer sits out in bottles for a week, then in the refrigerator for another week before they’re completely ready to drink.

Drinking- The fun step! This batch ended up lighter than a traditional Guinness, but it came out clean and tasty.

Now, this was the totally unscientific, bare basics explanation for what is actually a pretty complex process. There’s a lot of work that goes into making a recipe for a specific kind of beer, but by using a mix, we were able to bypass that step. There are tons of different mixes and brew kits available online. You can also read some more in-depth descriptions from professionals who know what they’re talking about here and here. Once you purchase all the initial equipment, buying mixes for new batches is relatively inexpensive. If you get a chance, home brewing is a fun experiment that will delight your inner beer lover.